Virtuatrocity

Summary: Elyse Winstead, teacher-of-the-year. She manages the pressures of her day-to-day by virutally flaying her most irksome pupils. But when one of them is actually murdered, Elyse is the prime suspect.

Virtuatrocity

The student at Elyse’s feet was missing half his face. The blackened
edges of what little skin remained curled at the tips like brittle autumn
leaves. If she touched him, she suspected he might crumble, like tapping the ash
from the end of a cigarette. She considered picking up the blowtorch again,
setting fire to the rest of him, not stopping until what remained amounted to
little more than a silhouette on the pavement, to be easily vacuumed up and
disposed of.

But it was more satisfying like this.
She knew he would die—for fucking certain; she could see through to his skull—she
just wasn’t sure how long it would take.

Little Derek Cooper—Coop to all his
friends—twisted and writhed. Elyse frowned. She tapped the side of her head
twice, upped the volume. His animal wail was at first a screech, static feedback.
The noise quickly levelled out; the distortion scrubbed clear and everything was—

Music.

Elyse shut her eyes, hummed a nursery
rhyme alongside Coop’s not-so-fire-retardant self. She was practically blissed
out on his agony.

When she decided she’d had enough—when
she pulled up the HUD and clicked the, oh
shit, I should’ve been at work twenty minutes ago—she lit Coop up like a
medieval funeral pyre and reached to her eyes and—

—Removed the ARtopia Model AR-15 headset.
She sucked in a large gulp of cinnamon air; she’d made sure this time to light
the scented candles before going
under, to mitigate the lingering stench of baconated twelve-year-old. Didn’t do
the job 100 percent, but it made a difference.

She placed the sleek black headset on
the desk in her bedroom, between her stacks of to-read romance novels and the
District 36 Teacher of the Year award given to her at an awards ceremony the
previous June. She grabbed her coat and her purse and hurried out the door.

And Elyse dreamt all goddamn day that it had been real. As Derek—as Coop
talked to his friends while she tried, with great futility, to focus on the
lesson; as he took red paint and dumped it on Marietta’s self portrait during
Art class; as he spent twice as long as any other student in the washroom, and
when a hall monitor finally brought him back she said he and two boys from
another class had been discovered pulling clothes out of change room lockers
and flushing them in the toilets.

She thought about how great it had felt
to watch him cook as he did all this and got away with it—because he was “only
twelve,” and “boys will be boys,” and because his mother was Stalin 2.0 of the
goddamn PTA. She commanded her wine-soaked acolytes as if the teachers were their
sworn enemies——a roadblock in her hell spawn’s education, because she didn’t
have the time to teach him herself or she would (because of course the teachers were the problem, and never her dear,
darling, perfect widdle angel). Elyse pictured Coop’s mother—chemotherapy
gaunt, all hard lines and acute angles beneath a dyed-blonde bob so tight her
eyes didn’t shut all the way when she blinked—and thought about how much she
wanted her to have to watch as she took Moira Cooper’s son out into the parking
lot and backed over him once or twice or a dozen times.

And then Coop snatched another student’s
book right out of her hands and chucked it out the classroom window, down onto
the all-weather field below, and Elyse grit her teeth and smiled her
Teacher-of-the-Year smile and calculated down to the second the time remaining before she could go home and kill every
inch of him again, and again, and again.

So it was a bit odd when, the next morning, Vicki, who taught Third
Grade, went up to Elyse in the teacher’s lounge and asked if she’d heard the
news. What news, Elyse inquired.

“That Derek Cooper kid is missing.”

“Missing? Really?” Elyse worked to
contain her grimace—more than likely Coop had had a fight with his mom and ran
away when he cut a hand on her cheek or something.

“True story: I saw Moira Cooper already in
the principal’s office with two police officers when I got here this morning.
She was looking all kinds of panicked. Sounds like he never made it home last
night.”

One
can only hope, Elyse thought
gleefully (thankfully) to herself. “What a tragedy,” she said with her outside
voice.

“He’s in your class—have you noticed
anything, I don’t know, strange going on with him?”

“No more than any other prepubescent boy.”

“Well, they’re probably going to want to
talk to you. Just to be on the safe side.”

No
shit. “Of course. I’ll
do what I can.”

Vicki smiled. She put a hand over her
heart, over her puke orange sweater knitted from the coats of a thousand dead
cats. Maybe. Probably.

“You’re just . . . you’re too much,” she
said sweetly, with complete and total sincerity.

Elyse grinned, mock-aw, shucks. “I just want to do what I can.”

They did want to talk to Elyse, though they didn’t get around to her
until after the start of lunch. Principal Chalk and two officers who called
themselves Wilks and Sanderson came up to Elyse at her desk as she ate a small
goat cheese and tomato salad and a bowl of grapes, and asked if they could
steal a moment of her time.

“What can I do for you, officers?” she
asked once they were in the hall, outside her seventh-grade classroom.

“Miss Winstead,” Officer Wilks began,
“as I’m sure you’ve been made aware, one of your students, Derek James Cooper,
has been missing now for nearly twenty-four hours.”

“Well you’re jumping the gun a bit,
aren’t you?” As soon as she spoke, Elyse wished she hadn’t.

Officer Sanderson cocked her head. “What
do you mean by that?”

Elyse cleared her throat. She felt her
face go neon. “You know, I just thought you had to wait at least twenty-four
hours before reporting these sorts of things.”

“That’s a myth,” said Officer Wilks. “If
something’s wrong we like to get started right away, especially with . . .
these sorts of things.” He paused, glared curiously at Elyse. “Is anything the
matter, Miss Winstead?”

Elyse crossed her arms. “I’m fine. I
like to read at night. I probably don’t get as much sleep as I should.”

Sanderson nodded like she knew something
but wasn’t ready to divulge. She passed Elyse a business card. “Our number’s on
there. Call us if you hear anything.”

Elyse took the card, nodded. Principal Chalk
and the officers turned and left.

That night, Elyse spent several minutes staring into the mirror above
the sink in her washroom, noting her bloodshot eyes with large dark hammocks
underneath, which seemed more exaggerated than they’d appeared that morning.

She left the washroom and turned off the
light. The ARtopia was on the nightstand where she’d left it after that morning’s
session, which she thought at the time had been a mere thirty minutes but had in
actuality been almost two hours spent watching and listening as her virtual
marionette screamed bloody murder, his limbs hacked off one-by-one with a
woodsman’s axe. A blunt woodsman’s
axe. It had been more satisfying than the blowtorch, though not as directly
pleasurable as that night the previous week when she sawed off the top of his
skull and tore out gelatinous hunks of brain like she was a child in the
plastic ball pit at a McDonald’s restaurant. She considered the ARtopia for a
minute before deciding to go straight to bed; it wasn’t as much fun when the
little shit might actually be in some kind of trouble.

They came for Elyse the next morning—Wilks, Sanderson, and a small army
of crime scene investigators equipped with rubber gloves and plastic bags for
gathering evidence. Sanderson said it was procedure—that they had to cover all
their bases, because the last place anyone reported seeing Coop was in Elyse’s
class.

They didn’t arrest her until after Sanderson picked the ARtopia up
off the nightstand, put it on, and played back the previous week’s archives.

“I don’t see what the big deal is,” said Elyse, seated at a small
table inside a glorified broom closet. Sanderson sat across from her, hands
clasped together on top of a manila folder. “They’re just fantasies. It isn’t
real.”

Sanderson sighed. “I was married once.”
She held up her left hand, showing the hard tan line around her finger, where a
ring had been until, it appeared, quite recently. “Love of my life and all
that. Takes a while for things to fade, if you get what I mean.”

“I’m . . . sorry?” Elyse said, confused.

“Things were good at first. Great, even.
That’s why you get married, right? Because you can’t imagine life without them.
But time takes a toll on everything. We tried counselling, saw some people—professionals
who promised us the sun and the moon—but things just kept getting worse. So
one day I picked up an ARtopia—for the both of us,” she added quickly. “The
AR-12 model. Not as advanced as yours, but it got the job done. We decided to
give it a try. Shouting at one another wasn’t helping matters, but I thought if
we could do a little more to each other—safely—that maybe we’d unearth
something.”

“Did it work?”

“For a spell. We worked through our shit
that way and we started liking each other a little more on the outside.”

“Then what happened?”

“A few weeks passed and she tried to
cave my head in with the toaster.” Sanderson pointed to the left side of her
head. “Twenty-five stitches, just under the hairline. After that, we were
done.”

“Officer, I don’t see—”

“She was confused,” Sanderson
interrupted. “She thought she was still inside the ’topia. She’d been using it
so often she’d started to build a world of her own in there. Whatever you
imagine is there, waiting for you.” She paused. “That was why we found all
those scented candles in the trash—you couldn’t not imagine the smell.”

“This is all well and good, Officer, but
I’m not your wife and I know my limits. I’ve never once gotten my realities
knotted up like—”

“We found Derek Cooper.”

“What?”

Sanderson nodded. “His body was discovered
in a ravine a half mile from the school. He was missing half his face, Miss
Winstead. It’d been burned clean off the bone.”

The revelation grew fat, filling the
space between them until Elyse felt as if Sanderson’s words were pressing against
her, shoving her up against the wall. When she was finally able to find her
words again, she uttered, “I didn’t kill him.”

“But you wanted to. The ’topia’s flash
memory archives every thought you have. You literally
daydreamed about killing him for weeks.”

“I didn’t kill him,” she said again,
with a bit more confidence. “I hated him, but I didn’t— I couldn’t— I would
never—”

“‘Never’ is the defense of the naïve,
Miss Winstead. It’s a fool’s claim. No one knows what they’d never do until
they just fucking never do it.”

“But I didn’t.” Elyse started to cry.

“We’ll see.”

Elyse had read once that a supervisor at a local electronics store
bludgeoned one of his employees to death with a laptop in the middle of his
shift. When questioned after the fact, he thought he dreamt the whole ordeal—stated
that he wasn’t to blame, he couldn’t do such a thing. At the time it sounded
ludicrous, the idea that someone could lose track of what was and wasn’t real.
But then it happened to her, when she went up to the guy at her gym she’d been
thinking about for weeks and kissed him on the lips, asked if he was picking up
Chinese for dinner. He’d looked at her as if they’d never spoken a word to one
another—which they hadn’t. She stopped using the ARtopia for a while after
that. It was a wonderful affair while it lasted—she’d been so much less afraid
of being rebuked. The embarrassment she’d experienced when reality slipped like
a steak knife between her ribs was almost more than she could handle.

That was different, though. That was a
brief lapse in judgement. A stupid, childish mistake—a rookie mistake, her face
appearing in the dictionary alongside the word itself. What had happened to
Coop, though—how does someone not know when they’ve killed another human
being? Wouldn’t there have been blood on her hands? Her clothes?

Elyse didn’t want to think about it.

But then she did.

And the more she tried not to think
about what had happened, the more her mind brought her back to what she’d
experienced inside the ARtopia. How easy it was, knowing there’d be no
consequences, to take Coop’s life and burn it all away, every last day of it.
Like it didn’t fucking matter. Like no one would miss him in the slightest.

And the more this happened, the more
Elyse allowed herself to be taken back—to take herself back to the moment(s)
she extinguished his sorry little life (well, not quite extinguished—more the
opposite, actually), the more she realized she hadn’t gotten confused. She
hadn’t gotten confused at all. She knew she hadn’t killed Derek Cooper. She’d
have remembered.

She’d have enjoyed it too much.

They released Elyse the next day on insufficient physical evidence. On
her way out the door, she saw Moira Cooper looking distraught, looking
downright polygonal. Looking like she was ready to go to war. She was demanding
to know how they could let a monster like Elyse Winstead go. She vowed revenge
against the woman who so hated her perfect widdle angel. She swore it even
after they found the man responsible for Coop’s death—some guy nobody knew,
nobody had even heard of, nobody had ever seen before.

It had all been a messy coincidence. A
messy, kind of hilarious coincidence, though Elyse kept that last part to
herself. They wouldn’t understand—people, that is. Anybody, really. They
hadn’t had to deal with Moira Cooper’s perfect widdle hellion ten months of the
year.

They didn’t understand at school,
either. Moira Cooper made it her mission to inform every parent about the
horrible, inhuman monster their teacher of the year really was. Elyse thought
of appearing before them to defend her actions, saying she was so good at her
job precisely because she went home at night and tortured and maimed and beat
the ever loving shit out of Coop—just Coop, it was worth noting—with a five
iron. It meant she was relaxed and better equipped to help the rest of their
kids be the best they could be. And you wouldn’t want a teacher who bottled all
that rage, would you? No, I don’t think you would. I don’t think you know just
how dangerous that could be. And Coop was just that special—her own personal
four-foot-nothing tumour in jeans and a basketball jersey three hundred days of
the year. Principal Chalk, however, told her not to bother, said they had an
image to uphold, and employing teachers who fantasized about murdering their
students was, for some reason, out of line with that image.

“He told me I should’ve tried smiling
more,” she said to Vicki on the afternoon of her last day, as she collected her
personal effects into a plastic egg crate. “He said I should’ve just tried
being happy, and maybe Coop wouldn’t have gotten to me the way he did.”

Vicki sighed as she played with the jar
of pencils in the World’s Best Teacher mug at the edge of Elyse’s (former) desk.
“He doesn’t understand,” she said, sadly.

“But you do?” Elyse took the mug from
Vicki’s hand. She contemplated hurling it across the room, or maybe stepping
into Chalk’s office and cracking it upside his head, watching as a seam opened
up in the side of his face and—

“I do,” Vicki said rather bluntly, the
words coming out of her like a pronouncement. “Life is about balancing
perspectives. You found yours. It made you good at what you do. Chalk’s using
you as a scapegoat. We’ve all had similar thoughts. He’d just rather they
stayed hidden.”

She paused then said again, “It’s all
about balancing perspectives. Derek was just something you had to work through
in order to do your job.”

“But I didn’t actually do anything. I
could never—”

“I know. But it would’ve been a lot more
interesting if you had.”

That night, unable to sleep, Elyse rolled out of bed and dived once
more into the ARtopia. She pulled little Derek Cooper from the ether. And as
she started slicing away at his skin with a paring knife in thin Velveeta
strips, she sighed dispassionately and thought about missed opportunities,
wondering how much better it had felt to do it for real.

Write a Review
Did you enjoy my story? Please let me know what you think by leaving a review! Thanks,
agawilmot

cbluke03:
Your story is very original. It did not just have an intellectual approach to it but also involved a plethora of human emotions. It was a nice read. As much as I enjoyed reading the story, I also am awed by the fact that how professionally you have succeeded in blending the flaws and concerns of ...

Ghostcat:
I always approach Fantasy stories written by new authors with some trepidation due to this genre's tendency to attract some real amateur Hacks. In reading Kiosan I was delighted to find a story that was well written with an engaging plot. The grammar was above average rendering a clear understand...

evie04201:
It is a really really really really * 100000 good like the whole thing it’s scary it leaves you wanting to read more I think you should make more of these types of creepypastas like this one job well done

James N:
Awesome story. Wanted to read it all at once! The text was awful! Poor translator? Chapters mixed up. I had to re-read lines to get the sense of what was written. This copy is crying for a proof reader to fix it into English. But I will look forward to the next adventure! Great story!

Patty Spangle Calvert:
loved it fast paced great Read story line great I could not wait for the next page it did not bore me like a lot of the great Authors Better than a lot of them..Keep up the great work I see greatness in you..And I still have a lot of there books unread from this Authers

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